1124 A GLASTONBURY ROMANCE
menibered a highly-coloured picture in his native national school
of Our Lord Himself, clothed in a costume resembling that of
old Bill Chant, Farmer Manley's head-shepherd, had jumped
at this proposal.
Curiously enough it was the eastern-European visitors—or pil-
grims, if you will—and indeed there were many of both types,
who seemed most impressed by these discourses of the head of
the new commune; and among these none were more affected
than certain monastic wayfarers from the slopes of Mount Athos.
There was no lack of scribes taking serious and copious notes
of all the man said; and although the London papers had
grown weary of him, "Geard of Glastonbury" was already a
legendary figure in Bulgaria, in Bessarabia, and in many a re-
mote religious retreat upon the Black Sea. The main drift of
Geard's singular Gospel was that an actual new Revelation had
been made in Glastonbury.
The crucial thing for Western humanity at this moment was to
concentrate a magnetic flood of desperate faith upon this magic
casement, now pushed a little open. "Scientists," explained Mr.
Geard, only he used homelier and less abstract language, "are
continually finding new cosmic vibrations, totally unknown or
only suspected before; and why should not a new element be-
longing to the Unknown Dimension in which our present dream-
life floats, be discovered by psychic, in place of physiological
experiment? It is all a matter of experience. The miraculous is as
much a portion of the experience of our race as is the most thor-
oughly accepted scientific law. The human soul"—so Mr. Geard
in his sublime ignorance of modern phraseology hesitated not
to declare—"possesses levels of power and possibilities of expe-
rience that have hitherto been tapped only at rare epochs in the
world's history. These powers we who live in Glastonbury must
now claim as our own; and not only enjoy them for ourselves,
but fling them abroad throughout the whole earth."
It was on the fifteenth of March that Mr. Geard's morning dis-
course—for he was often found in his Heathen Pantheon, as Miss
Drew called it, as early as eight o'clock—was interrupted in the
startling and dramatic manner that has now become part of Glas-
tonbury's history. There had been disturbing news for the past